Teenagers translate Pokemon For the Facebook Generation

You start with a sample that is small and weak. Your job: Raise and train the monster to battle and best your friends ' samples.

For those coming of age in the late ' 90s, this role-playing game sequence brings to mind the Pok?mon franchise; the Facebook generation may instead come to associate the monster RPG with MinoMonsters.

MinoMonsters is a Y Combinator social game upstart founded by teenagers Josh Buckley and Tyler Diaz, 19 and 17 respectively. The duo view their monster machination as a modern-day version of Pok?mon, Zynga's primed to eat lunch with the emotional engagement of an RPG and the casual appeal of a social game.

"Zynga, I think we can all agree, is fairly good at social games," Buckley said to a packed house at Y Combinat's Demo Day in Mountain View, California. "But, what they don't focus on is emotional engagement. You're not going to find kids this Christmas begging their parents for a CityVille plush toy. Pok?mon, on the other hand, could sell anything with their name on it at the start of the decade. "

Buckley and Diaz are Y Combinat's youngest founders ever. Buckley has an impressive pedigree for a teen, having sold his first virtual world company when he was just 15. Together, the pair appear to have a solid grasp on the gaming space and hope to have found a formula — social gaming + emotional engagement = MinoMonsters — that will make Pok?mon's $ 24 billion franchise seem miniscule.

As for the MinoMonsters game itself, it lives in Facebook and tasks players to choose a monster, teach it skills, take it on adventures, progress to higher levels and grow a clan by battling other monsters.

It could easily become addicting for social gamers — though this reporter in het bijzonder, who admittedly never glommed on to the Pok?mon movement, is not exactly hooked. Perhaps I'm in the minority — the four-week-old game now has more than 110,000 players and is experiencing 10% growth each day, says Buckley.

MinoMonsters gamers can expect Android and iPhone applications for mobile game play in the near future. Plus, the startup is talking to investors and hopes to secure $ 1 million in funding, a round that will likely fuel more rapid developments.

Image courtesy of joshbuckley.net

First trailer for The House

A Korean animated film about ghosts who live in your House.

The House was made by Park Mi-Sun, Park Eun-Young, Ban Joo-Young, Lee Hyun-Jin and Lee Jae-Ho, five fresh graduate students KAFA of the (Korean Academy of Film Art). There they get the chance to not only short films, but also feature-length animated films. The young animators in spe a lot of useful experience.

(Imagine if they thing in Netherlands and Belgium would do, I'm already excited.)

What is a House exactly? A place where you eat, drink and sleep? Something where you feel safe? Where you can always contact? Is that not a little family? The House describes a House as a place where people and spirits live together. The story is set in a poor neighborhood that must give way to new buildings. The people are being forced to move and minds remain orphaned behind. When a girl her in an old House, she a confused mind. He asks her for help and wants the demolition of the old neighborhood.

First trailer for The House (2011)

(Via CTK, HC, AI and GB)

Read also: number 13: Monster House
Read also: animated short film: The counterfeit Cat
Read also: how scary Monster House?
Also read: The first 3D smurf is spotted: top or flop?
Read also: animation movies on tv (11 april – 16 april)
Do you have Animation. Blog still not added to your Google homepage or Reader? Click here!

Junot Diaz Reflects on Tokyo

Reuters/Issei Kato-Corbis Smitten with Tokyo's streets. Here: the hip or Shibuya ward.

I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the ' 80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst its economy crippled for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai movies. Tokyo for all sorts of reasons spoke to me. By the time I was ready to start having fantasies about any city other than New York, Tokyo was already "the default setting of the future" — Blade Runner city! — and whether because of my childhood poverty or personal inclination, the future was where I longed to be.

It took a while — I wasn't the kind of kid who could afford to just up and go wherever he liked — but I did finally make it to Tokyo. My best friend, a Japanese-American who'd relocated back to the home country after college, was hosting me. It was a strange time, really. My friend was scheduled to have open heart surgery the following month, which was part of the reason I had flown about when I did. You know: just in case. He had pretty much decided that no matter what the doctors said about the risks, he was going to be fine, and all that really mattered at the time was showing me as much of Tokyo as possible. His way of dealing with it. So that's basically what we did for the next three weeks. Saw Tokyo. Lived it. And predictably I fell in love.

With what? The typical stuff. All the bells and whistles of its modernity. The strangeness of it, the impossible overwhelming scale. With the ramen shop behind my friend's apartment that served the greatest gyoza I'd ever eaten. With his hip neighborhood, Shimo-Kitazawa. With the last trains back from Shibuya, everybody smashed. With the curry shops that were a revelation to me. With the ginkgo trees and the parks that, despite Tokyo's insane urbanism, were everywhere. With the castles and the temples and the costume tribes that gathered in Ueno Park on the weekends. With the fact that you couldn't walk five feet in Tokyo without being tempted by some new deliciousness. With the eyeglass-washing stations. With the crows and the wooden crutches propping up ailing trees. With the glimpse of Mount Fuji from the top of the Metropolitan Government building. With the salsa clubs in Roppongi. With my little train book that I carried with me everywhere.

I could go on. We all can when we talk about the cities we love. Tokyo just did it for me the way London or Rome or Paris or Barcelona does it for other people. My childhood self with all his longings resonated with Tokyo's futurism. My immigrant self grooved on the familiarity of being an utter stranger, or being gaijin No.1; it was not so long before that America had been as incomprehensible to me as Japan. My apocalyptic self (highly developed after an ' 80s childhood) froze at the scars of Tokyo's many traumas.

It is a strange thing to love a city. In the end because no city is entirely knowable. What you love really are pieces of it. You are like Dr. Aadam Aziz forever peering at sections of his beloved through the perforated sheet. In Midnight's Children the sheet was finally dropped and the beloved revealed, but with cities that never happens. That is perhaps part of the allure, what brings us back to the cities we love: our desire to accumulate enough pieces so we can finally have it whole within us. But to love a city is also to love who we were at that time we fell in love. For me, my love for Tokyo is intertwined with my love for my best friend, who did, in the end, survive his surgery.

Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable. No city in the world makes that vulnerability more explicit than Tokyo. In the last century alone Tokyo was destroyed two times. Once by the Great Kanto Earthquake and again by the bombings of World War II.

Each time Tokyo has risen anew.

Today, as radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station drifts toward Tokyo, I am again thinking about the vulnerability of cities and of our love for them. Perhaps cities provoke so much love because they know that in that love lies their own endurance. After all, isn't it true that for all their vulnerability, as long as a city is loved by someone it will never truly disappear? Isn't that what it really means to love a city the way I love Tokyo: to carry within yourself the possibility, however faintly, or its rebirth?

D?az is the author, most recently, or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Next View As Single Page

Animated short film: The Incident at Tower 37

Find out what was happening in water tower number 37.

After The Incident at Tower 37 more than two years, afgeschuimd has all kinds of festivals, the movie since yesterday (on the occasion of world day for water) now also on the internet. The story revolves around two mysterious men who plans an attack on a giant water tank.

The animated short film was created and directed by Chris Perry of Bit Movies (in collaboration with a lot of animation students from the Hampshire College). The story takes some surprising twists and that ensures that The Incident at Tower 37 the ten minutes of your time is worth.

Animated short film The Incident at Tower 37 (2009)

(Via Cartoon Brew)

Read also: animated short film: Meddlen Meddows
Also read: Rapunzel goes viral: Double Tower
Read also: animated short film: Mo'Sam Experience
Read also: animated short film: One Rat Short
Read also: Katy Perry not too sexy for The Simpsons
Do you have Animation. Blog still not added to your Google homepage or Reader? Click here!

Dutch vote for Winnie the Pooh

You had already suspected it might be, but we make it uniform officially. The new cartoon with Winnie the Pooh appears only a Dutch version in the cinema. We have already the voice actors for you.

Walt Disney aims with the release of the new cartoon, especially at a young target group and will therefore be of Winnie the Pooh only an English dubbed version in the rooms appear. At the bottom you will find an overview of the English and Dutch actors who lend their voices to well-known characters.

You will notice that this time there was not chosen for a ' popular ' cast that is known of radio or tv, but for a collection of professionals. People who were chosen because they have a good voice and not because they have a known header. A qualitative choice I personally. A hip presenter makes still no good voice actor, but that is a topic that I for another time savings.

At the press conference I attended was the original, English version of the film was shown. On the film review you have to wait, but what the votes I can reassure that they very well were similar to the original versions from the older films and series. A pleasant surprise. About the Dutch version I can so, as there is for a professional cast was chosen, I suspect that you may expect an excellent dub.

English voices

The original, English version contains the voices of Jim Cummings (Pooh, Tigger), Travis Oats (Piglet), Bud Luckey (Eeyore), Craig Ferguson (Owl), Tom Kenny (Rabbit), Kristen Anderson-Lopez (Kanga), Wyatt Hall (Roo), Jack Boulter (Christopher Robin) and John Cleese (Narrator). Actress Zooey Deschanel sang a few songs for the film.

Dutch voices

In the Dutch version you hear Job Abrasion (Pooh), Kees van Lier (Tigger), Philip ten Bosch (Piglet), Paul Kloot? (Eeyore), Jerome Reehuis (Owl), Hein Boele (rabbit), Beatrijs Sluijter (Kanga), Frenk Hakkaart (Roe), Jesse Pardon (Janneman Robinson) and Kees Coolen (Narrator). The songs were translated by Hanneke van Bogget and sung by Sita Vermeulen.

The new Winnie the Pooh is on 6 april 2011 in Belgian cinemas expected. The Dutch release is planned for 20 april 2011. The trailer for the traditional cartoon find you're still in this post. For more info and pictures click here.

Also read: First trailer for the new Winnie the Pooh
Read also: colorful film poster for Winnie the Pooh
Also read: First teaserposter for Winnie the Pooh
Also read: New images for cartoon Winnie the Pooh
Also read: new character posters for Winnie the Pooh
Do you have Animation. Blog still not added to your Google homepage or Reader? Click here!

Game Top 10: gamers like shooting

Source: REUTERS Published on March 18, 11, 17: 52 last updated on March 18, 11, 17: 59 Rijswijk-Gamers diving with Shogun 2/Total War in Japanese history. The game for the PC on clans and power comes in on the second spot. People with choosing a XBOX360 and PS3 shooter game especially for the Home front. That means loss for Killzone 3. That shootergame is third, dropped to the seventh position.

Game Top 10 week 12

(notation, parentheses listing last week, game, game console, based on General Game top 10 compiled by GfK Dutch Charts)

1. (1) Pokemon White-DS

2. (-) 2/Shogun Total War-PC

3. (2) Pokemon Black-DS

4. (-) HomeFront-XBOX360

5. (-)-PS3 Home front

6. (-)/Assassin's Creed Brotherhood-PC

7. (3) Killzone 3-PS3

8. (7)/Call of Duty Black Ops-PS3

9. (6) Dragon age 2-XBOX360

10. Just Dance (5)-Wii

Dark concept art for Frankenweenie

Gereanimeerde dogs and impending windmills. See a lot of preparatory Frankenweenie, artwork for the new stop-motion film of Tim Burton.

Frankenweenie is based on the short film of the same name, Tim Burton from 1984. His new film, however, is a black-and-white stop-motion animation in 3D in the movie theatres is released.

The story revolves around the young Victor and his dog Sparky. When the cheerful friend is hit by a car, his boss brings him back to life with electrical impulses (? la Frankenstein, hence the title). Victor wants his creation for the outside world hidden, but that is not the meaning of the little monster ...

Previously you could already see some photos of the dolls of the two main characters, but underneath you will find also a gallery with artwork of Dennis Greco. We know that there are in the film a ' Dutch ' Day Parade takes place (read: windmills, wooden shoes, tulips). With a bunch of creepy Mills is already strongly represented Netherlands at the following artwork.

The new stop-motion film appears in America on 5 October 2012. Some sketches and more information about Frankenweenie you find in our previous posts.

Concept art for Frankenweenie (click for higher resolution)

(Thanks to my good colleague of Focus On Animation)

Read also: Tim Burton brings Frankenweenie in 2012
Read also: Tim Burton finds votes for Frankenweenie
Read also: known characters in Frankenweenie or not?
Read also: Tim Burton can finally begin to Frankenweenie
Read also: Rumor: Tim Burton makes Frankenweenie?
Do you have Animation. Blog still not added to your Google homepage or Reader? Click here!

Why not regularly release some fan sub groups

I am actually even not in the mood to Buroggen, but this was just nice to read. And because I have no desire, I do not translate the stuff also. So if you can not English, must not read more or ask Google tan. I found have it when Licca fansubs, which themselves very regularly release, they are blatant people.
Oh, and read the a long comment to. According to own a German, who is in any gay community and the former Fansubber. NYA, also from the few typical spelling errors aside, not really worth reading, but it was a German!

When I say "fansubbing groups", this does include Licca fansubs. We try to release on a consistent schedule, but we often do not. This post meant to criticize not is any group; It just illustrates a point that most people are not really aware of.

Many people who talk certain series to members of fansubbing groups ask when a certain episode of a is released. Often the response is "when we get to it", or some other vague and pi?ce response. To explain why, I will use a hypothetical situation.

Imagine that you are an employee of a company. You are the project leader for some really important product, and you have 10 people working under you. The market conditions and research say that you need to create a product once every so many days. You are, of course, given all the tools and equipment needed to accomplish this.

However, the policies of the company, and by extension the people working under you, are rather strange. You may ask your people working under you for a 40 hour week, but HR and company policy say they can work any number of hours per week. They may work anywhere from 0 hours to working all the time without sleeping or resting. They may take as long of a vacation between working days and not lose their job. The people working for you are not paid, or if they're of paid, they aren't a t paid very much. If your people show up at the office, they may spend an hour doing actual work, and 7 hours watching movies on cable TV. Your people may just conduct other "personal business" while they're in the office. You cannot fire them (regulations), dock them in pay (they're not being paid and they have a much better paying job elsewhere), or use physical force to make them work.

As the project leader… how do you manage your team of people, as described above, and keep a consistent schedule? The answer is you cannot. You are at the whim of your team.

What I just illustrated is your typical team of subbers in a fansubbing group. It is literally a project management nightmare.

Tags: Fansubbing, release speed

New images from the Barbarian Ronal

Forget (the new remake of) Conan the Barbarian, in Denmark is to a much more interesting, uncensored parody the hero worked: Ronal the Barbarian, "a film with girls, balls and muscles in 3D" …

No sweet juicy animal films and cute family films for Kresten Vestbjerg Andersen and Thorbj?rn Christoffersen. The two Danish directors working on Ronal barbarians (Ronal the Barbarian), an animated film about a flaccid barbarian who ends up in a comic adventure.

The weak Ronal is an exception in his village full of muscular men and women. He is a wimp, but fate makes sure he is the only one that his village from destruction can save when the evil Lord Volcazar kidnaps all the barbarians. If there is only overblijver for Ronal a dangerous trip to take in order to liberate his clan. Along the way he meets a lot of "special" combatants (see artwork).

In Denmark the Barbarian Ronal appears in the autumn of 2011. There are also plans for an English version worked, but when that is expected is not yet known. The first teaser for this animated film with balls you find in our previous post.

New promotional images for the Barbarian Ronal

(Via Twitch)

Also read: Ronal the Barbarian: a film with balls
Also read: Fantastic artwork for Ronal the Barbarian
Also read: new movie poster 9 collects main characters
Read also: Teri Hatcher in voice speaks for Coraline
Also read: the Da Vinci titles that remained hidden
Do you have Animation. Blog still not added to your Google homepage or Reader? Click here!

New trailer for paashaas comedy Hop

Hare humor and an overdose of sweets. This is the new trailer for Hop.

Hop was the second film of Illumination Entertainment. The successor of Despicable Me "is a combination of live action with computer animation, and was directed by Tim Hill (Alvin and the Chipmunks).

In Hop, the Easter Bunny (Hugh Laurie) retire, but his son E.B. (Russell Brand) does not make sense to the family affair on Easter Island. He would rather be drummer and flees to the human world. There, he accidentally hit by Fred (James Marsden), an unemployed Slacker. E.B. pretends he is severely injured and enjoys plenty of Fred's guilt. But without the Easter Bunny breaks Meanwhile on Easter Island a power struggle between the chicks and the help of the Easter bunny rabbits ...

The comedy is in the Dutch and Belgian rooms expected on 30 March 2011. More info and footage from the new Easter film can be found in our previous posts.

New trailer for hops

Also read: New images from Hop: My Dad the Easter Bunny
Also read: First trailer for paashaas comedy Hop
Also read: new characters from paashaas comedy Hop
Read also: colorful movie posters for hops
Also read: New images from Hop
Do you have Animation. Blog still not added to your Google homepage or Reader? Click here!